If the porch is LEO, going out on the porch and coming back in a bunch of times, same as we have been doing for quite some time, isn't going to get us closer to The Next Town/Mars.
You've entirely missed the point. You would leave through the garage to go on a long trip, but that assumes that you already have the experience to travel those roads in safety. It's just a complete load of bollocks to think that one goes from being a landlubber to being an interplanetary explorer without some serious practice in the immediate vicinity first.
Our shuttles and the ISS consume very large quantities of money, and don't give us much return.
Forgive me if this sounds anal, but I really think you need to add an "IMO" to that. It's not a statement of fact and the scientific community would argue the point as being ludicrous. Perhaps the return on investment is not worth the cost to you, but the comment fails to stand up as a blanket statement.
Real scientific research goes on up there in areas that will offer significant benefits to future off-planet manufacturing, mining and general exploration. Moreover, I think that this stuff is necessary simply because as technologically adept as our species is proving to be, we're incredibly stupid with regard to controlling our population so as to live in harmony with our environment. It's only a matter of time before overcrowding puts us in a position where we really do need to consider living off-planet.
I don't think we'll be wise enough to avoid it, to be pessimistically honest.
The money that has been spent is gone. We should make all current decisions based on what gets us the most for our money going forwards.
I quite agree, but urge you to consider that long-term gains are often trashed in the search for short-term profits. Make no mistake, space exploration is a long-term project. To expect it to be anything but a money pit within the next 50 years is just silly. Hell, we haven't even been flying earth-bound for all that long. Keep things in perspective.
It is better for Nasa to decide these things on their own terms, instead of having Congress show up with the axe.
Man, do I ever agree! Unfortunately, a researcher's agenda is often closely tied to an investor's purse. NASA's just living within the contraints of what they had to sell to maintain funding.
There's no doubt that a magnitude of -3 is bright enough to see with the naked eye, but the problem we'll have is the close proximity to the sun that the comet will have during its peak intensity. That will likely negate the ability to view it with the naked eye. SOHO C2 and, maybe, C3 images would be the best bets to observe this comet as it passes by the sun.
Is this probe that unimportant, that even/. geeks have rejected talking about it?
The problem isn't so much the importance of the probe, but that the mission itself is now about clean-up and little more. Assuming that the chances of contacting CONTOUR are somewhere between slim and none, there's not much about which to get excited.
The probe itself -- or, more correctly, the study of comets -- is absolutely significant. Various theories suggest that the very seeds of life itself were brought to earth by way of comet impacts. Being able to get close-up and personal with a comet could prove to be very informative if not enlightening.
The problem with this story is that the communication attempts on the 15th and 17th represent NASA's obligatory "last-ditch efforts" and offer no real new hope.
This is something that I've been puzzling over. Since we have cable-modem technology, what's to stop a cable tuner from calling home and reporting to the cable operator what channel you're viewing at any given moment? I'm not saying that this is actually being done, but I can think of no reason why such a thing couldn't be implemented. And if I were a cable operator, this would certainly be the sort of information that I'd be very, very interested in seeing.
Well, if what the article said was accurate, you're not missing much as far as climate-related causes of avalanches.
What is missing here is that the microstructure of the snow is studied prior to triggering the avalanche and then analyzing the flow characteristics. When you've found an avalanche exhibiting excellent flow, you've also found high-risk conditions for an unintentional trigger. In this regard, climate is absolutely related to avalanches as it is the weather prior to an event that creates snow conditions ripe for an avalanche to occur.
Basically, he said that if avalanches causing fatalities happen, they will most likely be caused by humans disturbing the snow cover, not because of natural conditions.
Correct, but it's the combination of disturbing the snow combined with the snow conditions that determines whether an avalanche will or will not happen. If you've got a beautiful bed of fresh, light powder snow from top to bottom, you're not likely to have an avalanche. Let's say, however, that you've had a 4-day period of mild temps that cause the snow to become rather granular. On the fifth day, you get 2 inches of heavy, wet snow at the head of a cold front moving in. The temps drop and the wet snow on top assumes a slab-like structure. This slab sitting atop a granular base is typical of spring avalanches. Dangerous stuff.
However, unless I missed something, he didn't make it clear how that data would be of use to most people.
Once you've established the snow conditions conducive to excellent flow characteristics, you can train people to avoid trigger areas in times of high-risk. A fair bit is known already, but there's still a long way to go before avalanche prediction is simple stuff.
Frankly, I ran identd because I always found it interesting to see who was requesting my ident. Now I'm behind a tight firewall, so it serves no purpose on my workstation, but my dial-up days were interesting in that regard.
I'm surprised that not a single post here mentioned this aspect of running the daemon. You guys are so friggin' busy trying to be anonymous you fail to see the obvious point of watching who's watching you. To me, that smacks of more time spent bein' a kiddie than an administrator.
mraymer, I have to thank you for the Celestia link! I hadn't heard of it. I have a 6-year-old daughter who is just nuts about astronomy (and all things in general). This will be a brilliant addition to our KStars explorations.
One of the things I immediately noticed was how homing in on Sol and then going to the Earth will make it simple to teach her how the seasons work. The field of view offered here is invaluable for helping young minds grasp such somewhat abstract concepts.
Thanks for the hint re: the Sun. Sadly, although "Halorates ksenius" is mentioned in the article, the search engine didn't find it. Figures. It took some work -- several hits produced search engine runtime errors -- but the last check struck gold.
But would you suggest that it is common for spiders to share webs with spiders of other species?
The whole point of this (discussion and news items) is that there's nothing common about any of it. Not only would it be hard to imagine multiple species jointly sharing the job of weaving such a web, it is hard to envisage tens of millions of the same species populating the area so densly.
One might also note that it's quite rare to find a web of this size, too.
It's possibly the largest web that we've ever seen.
you noted that some spiders behave a certain way, and presumed to then conclude that these spiders necessarily behave the same way. That does not follow.
Well, then, show me some facts to the contrary and I will very open-mindedly follow up. Understand, the study of aranaea and mantidae is a serious hobby for me and I'm engaging you in this discussion not to win a point but to gain information.
Perhaps it's inconceivable to you that they all belong to the same species, but you gave no supporting evidence beyond supposition
Okay, I'll bite: what supporting evidence beyond supposition have you provided in this regard? Making such a claim and then failing to provide same doesn't add to your credibility. Are you speaking from your knowledge of aranaea and it's members' behaviour or are you just attempting to diffuse my "argument"?
I'm trying to draw out facts and I'm unable to get anything other than the name of a species for which there is virtually no information publicly available. This is rather frustrating. While the Vancouver Sun may have reported this information, they certainly didn't bother to put it on the web. *sigh*
If Halorates ksenius exhibits a tendency to cross over to neighbouring webs to feast, as you seem to suggest, or engages in massive-scale communal web weaving regularly, this would be radical behaviour that differs from any other web-weaver of which I'm familiar. It's also worth noting the difference between the more common "silk atop clover" communal weave versus the scope of this web, which was non-sticky, thick enough to support a handful of loonies and was suspended a metre or more above the ground.
As for inconceivable (usage 2: So unlikely or surprising as to have been thought impossible -- American Heritage Dictionary), it still is. I'm having trouble with the idea of a 60-acre field having a Halorates ksenius population density of 2 spiders/cm. Even without the web, this would be highly unusual, don't you think? For an area to sustain such a large population of a single species, conditions there must be/have been extraordinary. And since I am unable to find any useful information with which to follow up, I cannot determine whether this apparently huge population of Halorates ksenius had forced out other species or were living alongside them.
It's frustrating to have so many questions and precious few answers.
Re:Saturday revisited
on
Giant Spider Web
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· Score: 3, Interesting
it would be pretty damn bizarre if several species of spider were able to coexist for so long without eating each other.
You think so? It's common for web-weavers to live in close proximity to one another. On a recent nature walk with my family, I found one bush that had no less than a dozen species of weavers living quite in harmony with one another. The whole "eating each other" business happens between hunter-types that don't weave webs and the web-weavers (or other hunter-types). It's a rare thing to hear of, say, two orb-weavers of the same species crossing over to another's web so as to attack and eat.
As for reports of Halorates ksenius, hell, I can only fine a single google result for that. Where are all these reports? Links, please.
Thanks for the hint. I checked the Sun and came up with this: 27-hectare spider web drapes fence on B.C. farm. What disappoints me about all of this is that there seems to be no agreement. One source says 60 acres, another says 24 hectares, another says 27 hectares and the professor says 60 hectares. The professor, I suppose, can be forgiven for his mistake on-air as he was probably nervous.
To me this sounds like they simply needed to revamp their whole setup to start with, be it with 3 windows/Mac/*nix servers.
First off, I'll admit that it's been a while since I administered NT Servers, but Microsoft server applications such as Exchange Server very often demand that it have full run of the joint. At my current place of employment -- less than 60 employees -- we have no less than 4 servers to handle Exchange Server, the BDC, the file server and an Oracle server. Then there are the firewalls, etc... It takes very, very little time for a Microsoft shop to be overrun with servers, I assure you.
Retraining? We're talking a vertical application here. User logs in with username and password (on a post-it note affixed to the monitor, no doubt). KDE automatically fires up KMail and the Java app that they'll use for the next 8 hours. Done business for a lot of folks.
The bank will consolidate 41 Windows NT servers in eight European branches down to three IBM iSeries servers in London with six remote IBM xSeries Intel servers.
The server boys are rejoicing at the fact they'll no longer have to fight so hard to keep the server rooms temperate. My last gig in an overcrowded server room was nasty. Bloody hot near the boxes and bloody cold where the cooling system was blasting air. Ugh.
And they're doing Linux on the desktop, too! Break out the champagne. Somebody actually bothered to see that Linux does Java quickly!
It might be a good opportunity to mention FreeDOS as a viable, open-source, 16-bit alternative to "that other vendor's" DOS. FreeDOS is actively being developed and maintained and will run on a lowly 8086 like any DOS should.
Yeah, back in the late-'70s, I had a multi-band radio that could pick up cellular conversations. As a teenager back then, I had an absolute blast listening to calls. It was better than TV. And I promise you, covertly listening in to a hot call between a guy and his girl when you're 16 years old is pretty impressive stuff!:lol:
I never got into blue-box stuff, but pre-scrambled cellular was heaps of fun.
I want it to have more *#$%*#*$ buttons so I don't have to use T9!
*GASP*
You don't like T9? I think it's bloody brilliant! I travel to Austria on business several times a year, so I bought myself a nice Sagem prepaid card phone. Sending an SMS is really quick and painless. Sure, if you step outside the bounds of what the dictionary knows, it's a bit painful, but if you stay within the dictionary, you can just fly!
For the mobile industry, Taiwan and Japan represent interesting case studies that offer evidence of the services consumers want. Though such evidence is far from conclusive, network operators, equipment operators, equipment vendors, handset providers and content developers that are still uncertain about how to make 3G successful might well take note.
The problem with looking at Asia for clues on how to sell services elsewhere in the world is that it completely overlooks the cultural connection. How do you translate a culture's love for "cute" to another culture's disdain for the same? The evidence here of what consumers want is tightly bound to what kind of trinkets and the like have captured the attention of the buyer.
The people who download Hello Kitty stuff for their cell phone are the same people who have Hello Kitty key fobs, knapsacks, hair clips, T-shirts, etc. It's a cultural phenomenon where a vast number of people are influenced by cute.
Cute isn't relegated to phones, screensavers and the like, either. When I worked at Fujitsu writing supercomputer and mainframe manuals, there was always the requisite cute section that told the system administrator how to insert floppy disks and take care of floppy media in general. These sections always included drawings of cute floppy disk guys suffering the abuse of magetism, incorrect insertion into drives or -- oh, the memories -- the dreaded high-temps! And, no, this was not just a matter of Fujitsu corporate culture. In freelancing, I did stuff for NEC supercomputer manuals that was basically the same. If it's a Japanese manual, it's got cute inside.
Cute manuals don't wash in North American tech manuals. Cute is taken to be an insult, I think, for a North American ubergeek. The point, therefore, is that our G3 providers have to always be sure to translate popular services based on cultural acceptance. Transliteration is doomed to be an expensive failure.
If you want to improve your critical reasoning skills, start by picking up then picking apart poorly thought out political statements, business proposals, op-ed essays, etc.
I completely agree. Unfortunately, my own company is full of engineers who have trouble with critical thinking. And abstract thought, for that matter. Primarily, I see this as an educational/cultural problem. The company for which I work is located in Tokyo and the "problem engineers" are Japanese.
Nobody taught them how to arrive at their own conclusions. They haven't developed the ability to think outside the box. If the problem and solution isn't described in a manual somewhere, they're lost.
Maybe a book like this would help them? I need my engineers, for example, to be able to troubleshoot test bed PC's at the customer site without always calling me in to do it. How do you actually teach somebody all the thought processes necessary to make them a good problem solver/troubleshooter?
I've been trying to figure this one out since I joined my company.
I have a self compiled 2.5.44 kernel, but... you're right it really isn't worth the time it takes to configure, compile, and possibly try again.
It's all relative. Back when I was running Slack on a 486/32-meg system, optimization was everything. With careful attention to trimming off the fat, the system was undeniably fast for a 486-class machine.
Now on a celery 700 with 256 megs and 4 wickedly fast hard disks, bloat is the order of the day. My PC has become the equivalent of a couch potato.;)
You're kidding, right? I recall running ICQ Java Preview 0.981a very happily on a 486 with 32 megs of RAM. Sure, that system may not have been the quickest, but ICQ Java was no less useable than, say, Emacs.
Slashdot Mirror
Real scientific research goes on up there in areas that will offer significant benefits to future off-planet manufacturing, mining and general exploration. Moreover, I think that this stuff is necessary simply because as technologically adept as our species is proving to be, we're incredibly stupid with regard to controlling our population so as to live in harmony with our environment. It's only a matter of time before overcrowding puts us in a position where we really do need to consider living off-planet.
I don't think we'll be wise enough to avoid it, to be pessimistically honest.I quite agree, but urge you to consider that long-term gains are often trashed in the search for short-term profits. Make no mistake, space exploration is a long-term project. To expect it to be anything but a money pit within the next 50 years is just silly. Hell, we haven't even been flying earth-bound for all that long. Keep things in perspective.Man, do I ever agree! Unfortunately, a researcher's agenda is often closely tied to an investor's purse. NASA's just living within the contraints of what they had to sell to maintain funding.
There's no doubt that a magnitude of -3 is bright enough to see with the naked eye, but the problem we'll have is the close proximity to the sun that the comet will have during its peak intensity. That will likely negate the ability to view it with the naked eye. SOHO C2 and, maybe, C3 images would be the best bets to observe this comet as it passes by the sun.
The probe itself -- or, more correctly, the study of comets -- is absolutely significant. Various theories suggest that the very seeds of life itself were brought to earth by way of comet impacts. Being able to get close-up and personal with a comet could prove to be very informative if not enlightening.
The problem with this story is that the communication attempts on the 15th and 17th represent NASA's obligatory "last-ditch efforts" and offer no real new hope.
Frankly, I ran identd because I always found it interesting to see who was requesting my ident. Now I'm behind a tight firewall, so it serves no purpose on my workstation, but my dial-up days were interesting in that regard.
I'm surprised that not a single post here mentioned this aspect of running the daemon. You guys are so friggin' busy trying to be anonymous you fail to see the obvious point of watching who's watching you. To me, that smacks of more time spent bein' a kiddie than an administrator.
I'm definitely looking forward to the movie. I just hope that the casting is done right.
:)
Time to brush off my old Alan Parsons Project and have a listen, too.
mraymer, I have to thank you for the Celestia link! I hadn't heard of it. I have a 6-year-old daughter who is just nuts about astronomy (and all things in general). This will be a brilliant addition to our KStars explorations.
One of the things I immediately noticed was how homing in on Sol and then going to the Earth will make it simple to teach her how the seasons work. The field of view offered here is invaluable for helping young minds grasp such somewhat abstract concepts.
Cheers!
Okay, so I did manage to find one useful article in the Vancouver Sun online: 60-acre spider web baffles biologists
Thanks for the hint re: the Sun. Sadly, although "Halorates ksenius" is mentioned in the article, the search engine didn't find it. Figures. It took some work -- several hits produced search engine runtime errors -- but the last check struck gold.
Cheers!
I'm trying to draw out facts and I'm unable to get anything other than the name of a species for which there is virtually no information publicly available. This is rather frustrating. While the Vancouver Sun may have reported this information, they certainly didn't bother to put it on the web. *sigh*
If Halorates ksenius exhibits a tendency to cross over to neighbouring webs to feast, as you seem to suggest, or engages in massive-scale communal web weaving regularly, this would be radical behaviour that differs from any other web-weaver of which I'm familiar. It's also worth noting the difference between the more common "silk atop clover" communal weave versus the scope of this web, which was non-sticky, thick enough to support a handful of loonies and was suspended a metre or more above the ground.
As for inconceivable (usage 2: So unlikely or surprising as to have been thought impossible -- American Heritage Dictionary), it still is. I'm having trouble with the idea of a 60-acre field having a Halorates ksenius population density of 2 spiders/cm. Even without the web, this would be highly unusual, don't you think? For an area to sustain such a large population of a single species, conditions there must be/have been extraordinary. And since I am unable to find any useful information with which to follow up, I cannot determine whether this apparently huge population of Halorates ksenius had forced out other species or were living alongside them.
It's frustrating to have so many questions and precious few answers.
As for reports of Halorates ksenius, hell, I can only fine a single google result for that. Where are all these reports? Links, please.
Thanks for the hint. I checked the Sun and came up with this: 27-hectare spider web drapes fence on B.C. farm. What disappoints me about all of this is that there seems to be no agreement. One source says 60 acres, another says 24 hectares, another says 27 hectares and the professor says 60 hectares. The professor, I suppose, can be forgiven for his mistake on-air as he was probably nervous.
Uhm, not quite. There's the small matter of 70,000 NT Workstation licenses...? ;)
Retraining? We're talking a vertical application here. User logs in with username and password (on a post-it note affixed to the monitor, no doubt). KDE automatically fires up KMail and the Java app that they'll use for the next 8 hours. Done business for a lot of folks.
And they're doing Linux on the desktop, too! Break out the champagne. Somebody actually bothered to see that Linux does Java quickly!
It might be a good opportunity to mention FreeDOS as a viable, open-source, 16-bit alternative to "that other vendor's" DOS. FreeDOS is actively being developed and maintained and will run on a lowly 8086 like any DOS should.
Damn. Sorry, this was supposed to be a reply to " It's like cellphones all over again" up above. My bad. :rolleyes:
Yeah, back in the late-'70s, I had a multi-band radio that could pick up cellular conversations. As a teenager back then, I had an absolute blast listening to calls. It was better than TV. And I promise you, covertly listening in to a hot call between a guy and his girl when you're 16 years old is pretty impressive stuff! :lol:
I never got into blue-box stuff, but pre-scrambled cellular was heaps of fun.
You don't like T9? I think it's bloody brilliant! I travel to Austria on business several times a year, so I bought myself a nice Sagem prepaid card phone. Sending an SMS is really quick and painless. Sure, if you step outside the bounds of what the dictionary knows, it's a bit painful, but if you stay within the dictionary, you can just fly!
trane
The people who download Hello Kitty stuff for their cell phone are the same people who have Hello Kitty key fobs, knapsacks, hair clips, T-shirts, etc. It's a cultural phenomenon where a vast number of people are influenced by cute.
Cute isn't relegated to phones, screensavers and the like, either. When I worked at Fujitsu writing supercomputer and mainframe manuals, there was always the requisite cute section that told the system administrator how to insert floppy disks and take care of floppy media in general. These sections always included drawings of cute floppy disk guys suffering the abuse of magetism, incorrect insertion into drives or -- oh, the memories -- the dreaded high-temps! And, no, this was not just a matter of Fujitsu corporate culture. In freelancing, I did stuff for NEC supercomputer manuals that was basically the same. If it's a Japanese manual, it's got cute inside.
Cute manuals don't wash in North American tech manuals. Cute is taken to be an insult, I think, for a North American ubergeek. The point, therefore, is that our G3 providers have to always be sure to translate popular services based on cultural acceptance. Transliteration is doomed to be an expensive failure.
Nobody taught them how to arrive at their own conclusions. They haven't developed the ability to think outside the box. If the problem and solution isn't described in a manual somewhere, they're lost.
Maybe a book like this would help them? I need my engineers, for example, to be able to troubleshoot test bed PC's at the customer site without always calling me in to do it. How do you actually teach somebody all the thought processes necessary to make them a good problem solver/troubleshooter?
I've been trying to figure this one out since I joined my company.
Now on a celery 700 with 256 megs and 4 wickedly fast hard disks, bloat is the order of the day. My PC has become the equivalent of a couch potato.